The boom and busts of the mining industry have left parts of the West littered with remnants of past operations, such as this abandoned silver mine in Leavick, Colorado. Photo © Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
In our last issue, we reported on a proposed mining operation under the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness in Montana. Here, longtime Montana resident Rick Bass writes about how the proposed mine could become a poster child for the abuses of the 1872 Mining Law.
The U.S. Forest Service didn’t have to issue a permit allowing mining under the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. They could have pointed out that a mine next to, beneath and within a wilderness is not compatible with the agency’s pre–existing mandate to protect the area’s resources. They issued the permit anyway. Ex–Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck is aghast, though he’s ever the gentleman; you will never hear him say anything negative about any Forest Service employee, at any level. Still, he says, he would not have permitted the mine.
The proposed mining operation would discharge 3.3 million gallons of wastewater per day into the Clark Fork River. The Canadian company seeking the permit, Revett Silver Company, previously named Sterling, has left considerable waste behind in other ventures.
Perhaps the best friend Revett has going for it—or thinks it has going for it—is one of the most rickety, archaic, toxic laws in existence: the 1872 Mining Law, written less than a decade after the Civil War and long before women could legally vote.
Written in the days before the government’s genocide program against the American Indians was completed—written in part to aid in that conquest and occupation, as a means of encouraging settlers to fill the wild country—the loopholes of the law still allow for miners to patent government land, anywhere in the country, for as little as $2.50 an acre. They pay little, if any, royalty on the resources extracted, and then take ownership of what should be public land. Of course, such a scam has drawn the attention of Canadian mining companies. Good work if you can get it, eh? Free American mountains, prime real estate for the taking!
All this was hypothetical, for a while. But the market irregularities that have attended the war in Iraq have made things more interesting. There’s been a recent run–up in silver and copper prices, making what previously looked like an economically sketchy site now worth a second look, if your business plan disregards things like grizzlies, mountains, wilderness, mountain goats, trout and lawsuits, not to mention passionate activists standing in line to fight the mine for the next five hundred years.
For the past couple of decades, Montanans and Idahoans have been scrimping and saving to secure the legal teams, along with grassroots organizing and outreach.
Karen Knudsen, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition in Missoula, is passionate about protecting the river. “Let’s be clear: This mine is madness,” she says. “The mine will wipe out struggling populations of grizzly bears and bull trout, threaten pristine lakes in one of the crown jewels of the national wilderness system and degrade the Clark Fork River forever….It’s time for the permitting agencies to quit wasting public time and money trying to defend the Rock Creek Mine with junk science, and instead recognize that there are some places that are too precious to mine.”
It’s provocative language for someone committed to consensus building, but that’s the kind of open–and–shut issue that defines the Rock Creek Mine. Matt Clifford, also with the Clark Fork Coalition, concurs. “The Rock Creek Mine is truly a bad idea. It’s premised on the assumption that you can drill over a mile into a mountain, hollow out a massive cavern beneath one of the most sensitive wilderness areas in Montana, and have no effect on the fragile overlying ecosystem. There’s no engineering precedent for this. The mine will likely discharge contaminated mine drainage into the Clark Fork for centuries to come.”
Just across the state line, in Sandpoint, Idaho, Mary Mitchell, executive director of the Rock Creek Alliance, is likewise pulling no punches.
“The federal government is cramming this down the throat of locals. It’s going to put our economy at great risk,” says Mitchell, pointing out that the Bonner County (Idaho) commissioners, as well as the Sandpoint City Council, oppose the mine. (Idaho’s congressional delegation has not yet come out against the mine.) Many of the proposed mine’s poisons, heavy metals and warm–water wastes would flow directly into Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille, upon whose blue waters depends the economic engine of the area: recreation.
Asarco Mining of Canada spent nearly $20 million pursuing the permit, and was dogged every step of the way by Cesar Hernandez of the Cabinet Resource Group, another Montana grassroots organization. After the Bush administration took office, the permit was finally granted, but by that time Asarco had bailed, selling its permit to Revett, whose principal, Frank Duval, is now attempting to sell shares in his company through an initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Duval, a past participant in at least a half–dozen other mining ventures that went bankrupt and/or left behind massively unfunded taxpayer cleanups, will be raising nearly $100 million of bonding in his quest to tunnel into the wilderness and place a 374–acre impoundment—an experimental settling pond for the poison—on the wilderness boundary. All this while treating (also in experimental fashion) and then discharging billions of gallons of metals–laced, warm water into the pristine Rock Creek and the recovered Clark Fork.
At risk, too, are some of the most beautiful mountain lakes imaginable—lakes which are in dire threat of vanishing, if the mine goes in. The tunneling and groundwater–pumping operations will create an uncontrollable (and unacceptable) risk of cracking the earth open like a chicken bone jawcracked by hyenas, so that those lakes would then seep away through the vertical blast–cracks and faults and fissures, swirling away down into those new fractures like old bathtub water down the drain.
IN NUMBERS GREATER THAN I’VE EVER SEEN, ENVIRONMENTAL groups are standing in line to go to court: the Clark Fork Coalition, Earthjustice, Cabinet Resource Group, Rock Creek Alliance, Montana Wilderness Association, Montana Environmental Information Center and Trout Unlimited (on behalf of the endangered bull trout that live in Rock Creek).
I was privileged to be able to file a plaintiff’s standing for the Sierra Club’s lawsuit on behalf of the Wilderness Act. I use the creek and the Cabinet Mountains wilderness several times each year to hike, both alone and with friends and family, and to hunt, fish, camp and pick berries. That particular portion of the wilderness has become as familiar to me as my hometown, or my home—the tufts of goat fur snagged on wild rosebushes, the moose pond, the strange bench–like rock formation above one of the lakes, a horseshoe–shaped natural amphitheater ideal for camping with young people and storytelling, high in the mountains. I can’t imagine my home invaded by the growling sound of an ore–processing facility just adjacent, or underground blasting and clawing rattling the rocks themselves. Incredibly, Revett says that allowing the mine to go forward will “protect the wilderness.”
SO MANY ISSUES SEEM TO BE CONSPIRING TO SETTLE AT THIS southern terminus, the weak link of the bottleneck, of the Cabinet–Yaak ecosystem. Just across the Bull River Valley, the largest remaining unprotected roadless area in the Cabinet Mountains, the Scotchman Peaks area—once proposed for wilderness designation by the Forest Service itself—is under attack in the current Forest Plan revision. Across the narrow floor of the beautiful Bull River Valley, the old and defunct Troy mine is also trying to re–open in the heart of grizzly country. Previously owned by Asarco, and later sold to Revett, there are lingering questions about mysterious barrels buried in the tailings pond. Asarco denied the barrels existed, but by using ground–penetrating radar, members of the Cabinet Resource Group proved that they do. What’s in them? No one knows, but Hernandez discovered that shipping manifests from the old Troy Project’s operations show a significant disparity between trichloroethylene received and trichloroethylene disposed of. (Yes, it’s poisonous.)
Revett ran a water quality survey three miles downstream, testing for trichloroethylene, and didn’t find any. The barrels, whatever they are, are buried deep. Not to worry, the company said.
IRONY: YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE IT’S COMING FROM. SOMETIMES it works against you, but other times it’s just as likely to flow with you. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t a natural force of the world, in the manner of fire and flood, blizzard and drought. Imagine being a multi–bankrupted mining official attempting to sell this package. Your man, your men and women in the White House, are out raising money—almost precisely as much money, coincidentally, as it took to clean up the last western river despoiled by your mine—but they are down in the polls. Metal prices have blipped up, because of the war. Imagine that you are heading up to Toronto to make your pitch with no fewer than eleven different lawsuits at your heels, and every one of them adding perhaps tens of millions of dollars to an already sketchy proposition.
Imagine that you wake up one morning, as the world did, quite unexpectedly, to see that the CEO of Tiffany & Co., Mike Kowalski, has published in the Washington Post a full–page letter to then Chief of the Forest Service, Dale Bosworth, scolding the agency for permitting the mine and stating that it believes the issue will become what the mining industry should have feared or realized: a poster child for the abuses wrought by the 1872 Mining Law.
“This huge mine would discharge millions of gallons of waste water per day conveying pollutants to the Clark Fork River and ultimately into Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho, a national treasure in its own right,” Kowalski wrote. “Vast quantities of mine tailings—a polite term for toxic sludge—would be stored in a holding facility of questionable durability. Wildlife already struggling to survive would face new perils.
“Other disputes of this nature, involving public lands administered by the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, are too often settled in favor of developers because statutes and departmental regulations tilt that way. The 1872 General Mining Act is a particularly egregious example. Enacted to encourage rapid development of sparsely settled regions at a very different stage in American history, this obsolete law virtually gives away public lands and the minerals under them to private interests. It remains a perverse incentive for mining in wilderness areas, near scenic watersheds, around important cold water fisheries, and in other fragile ecosystems—all of which are inappropriate for mineral development.…
“We at Tiffany & Co. understand that mining must remain an important industry. But like some other businesses benefiting from trade in precious metals, we also believe that reforms are urgently needed. Minerals should—and can—be extracted, processed and used in ways that are environmentally and socially responsible. Government and industry each has a role to play in shaping sensible measures to achieve this goal.
“As this effort goes forward, I hope that we can look to the Forest Service and its sister Federal agencies for cooperation.”
THERE STILL EXISTS, BARELY, AN UNBROKEN CHAIN OF WILDERNESS—some of it protected, some of it not—reaching down from Canada and the Yaak’s Northwest Peaks to the southern end of the Scotchman Peaks in the Cabinets: a narrow spine of rock and ice on which mountain goats and grizzlies find their last redoubt, while gazing down at tiny swatches of privately owned bottomland below, while even farther down lies a stone–clutched, wilderness–bound river, or at least creeks and streams, of frozen copper and elusive silver.
Up above, everything still proceeds as if normal. Those beleaguered last ten or fifteen grizzlies keep on going about their business, as if marooned on the highest spines of rock and ice. The waters of the Cabinet Mountains remain unspoiled and the air is still pristine, untainted by diesel stink. The silence, too, is golden. Families still picnic in the wilderness, and hike, backpack and ride horses in this farthest land. A dark beast slouches toward the temporary treasures housed within, and eleven lawyers, each with one arrow in his or her quiver, are kneeling within the stone fortress they’ve forever vowed to forever defend. It seems that only the king of jewelers and the chief of the Forest Service can prevent the coming war.